Archives for August 2014

In January 2012, Imran Khoja ’12 and Katy Gathright ’12 won the first ever Williams College Business Plan Competition. Following graduation, they took the prize money and started Designed Good – an online marketplace for products that are produced in a socially responsible way. After eight months living in Williamstown at an apartment with no heat and many more months struggling to build the company, Khoja is still at the helm of Designed Good.

Having deferred the start of Stanford Business School until the fall of 2015, Khoja is hard at work designing products, managing the website, and learning about what it takes to run a business.

I recently caught up with Khoja in his Boston-based apartment and learned about the ups and downs of his life as a young entrepreneur.

In many ways Pei-Ru Ko’s time at Williams was a classic success story. After considering transferring during her first year, she went on to serve as a Junior Advisor and member of College Council, write for the Record, and create Storytime. She left Williams determined to bring her abundant energy to other communities. Only a few months after graduation, however, those plans were cut short.

While home in Taiwan, Ko developed a rare and crippling autoimmune condition. For the past four and a half years her primary task has not been career advancement, but survival. While traditional medicine was little help, she found that real, organic food had a surprising healing power. Now, as her health improves, she is launching a non-profit called Real Food: Real Stories to use her love for storytelling to give back to the farmers who aided in her recovery.

I met Ko near her apartment in San Francisco to learn about her journey and hear how her illness provided new perspective on questions of life, career, and success.

It’s every guy’s dream. Start a beer company after college with your best friend. After years of discussions in the bullpen where the two former pitchers spent much of their college years, that’s exactly what Tommy and Wilson did. United by their love of beer and desire to run their own company, the two bucked conventional wisdom and launched Snake Bite USA – a mixture of lager and hard cider.

With little more than a passion for the idea and a willingness to learn, the two have built Snake Bite into a recognizable brand in the Bay Area.

I joined Tommy and Wilson for lunch and a six-hour tour of Northern, visiting with their distributors and delivering pitches to prospective stores. Along the way, I learned about the ups and downs of Snake Bite’s early years and gained an appreciation for the way passion can lead to success.

By early October 2013 time was running out. Robby Cuthbert had spent the last two years creating artistic furniture. Now, living with his girlfriend in Palo Alto, the money from a previous Kickstarter campaign was running low, and he figured he had a few months to see if he could turn his project into a sustainable business or move on.

On a whim, Cuthbert posted an album of his work on Reddit, a massive user-generated site where posts rise and fall on the homepage based on reader feedback. Within a day, Cuthbert’s album rose all the way to the number one spot, where it stayed for twelve hours.

Cuthbert’s website went from generating 100 views a day to 175,000 the day his album appeared on Reddit. Orders flooded in. Magazines requested interviews. He was invited to design shows across the country.

I caught up with Cuthbert in his one-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto to hear about his long road to overnight success and learn about the creative spirit that got him there.